Serious Clothes That Still Know How to Have Fun

For a long time, I thought of Maria McManus as the Substack designer. All the cool-girl shopping newsletters I follow—Laura Reilly’s Magasin, Leandra Medine's The Cereal Aisle, Lauren Pantin’s Earl Earl, Becky Malinksy’s Five Things—mention her soft, sophisticated pieces pretty regularly. McManus is so passionate about sustainability that you’d think it would be the first thing anyone would register about her brand, but for me, it was the fact that she seemed to be constantly getting recommended by women whose tastes I admired.

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Plenty of those women were in the room at McManus’s fall 2024 show today at the lighting showroom Roll and Hill in Soho. So was Jenna Lyons (though not, sadly, Gwyneth Paltrow, who stocks McManus on Goop and has been known to wear her clothes). Models descended from a spare wooden staircase wearing a mix of serious, body-covering looks and more playful knit briefs and sheer skirts. There was a schoolgirl in a black pleated miniskirt and brown cardigan, a ballet instructor in black lace leggings, and a party girl in a silver bubble skirt. What tied them together was a lack of showiness, a deep consideration of details, and the sense that these women were not messing around.

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This season, McManus was inspired by the Irish architect Eileen Gray, who is perhaps best known for E-1027, the modernist home she designed in the South of France. She’s also the creator of the Dragon chair, known as “the most expensive chair in the world” after a buyer purchased it from the estate of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge for $28 million. (This is not exactly Gray’s first mention in Bazaar; we featured a home she designed in an issue from 1920.) “She had a little bit more of a feminine approach,” McManus told me after the show. “There was always so much texture in her rooms. They felt comfortable and inviting, but meanwhile still minimal, if that makes sense.”

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Her description called to mind the current moment in decor, when standard-issue millennial minimalism has opened up to something softer and more livable. You could see Gray’s influence all over the clothes, which came in Gray-approved shades of black and cocoa dust and red. McManus is one of those designers, like Phoebe Philo, who operate in the key of a woman speaking directly to other women, and while not everything looked easy to wear—the briefs were really teeny—it did all telegraph a kind of ease.

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If the clothes were relaxed, though, the philosophy behind them was rigorous. After the show, McManus came out to address the crowd, giving a speech that was so clear-eyed about the state of the fashion industry that I’m just going to quote it in full:

This collection was inspired by Eileen Gray, an Irish architect and designer, and as I was learning more about her and her life, it was so incredible to see how considered she was about every single element of what she created. If she designed a room for a client, she considered the paint color and the light fixture and the screen and the lacquer. And I think in today's world, we're being sold luxury, but I don't know that we're actually creating luxurious products that are truly considered in the way that product was considered back in the twenties. I think that the objective is more to get to a billion dollars or a hundred billion dollars. It's not necessarily about creating luxurious items that are going to last a long time.

Everybody in this room knows the responsibility that we all have and that the industry hasn't been great, but it's always been like that. The fashion industry has a history of over 500 years of exploiting vulnerable people, polluting land, polluting water, but because we all consume so much more these days, the issue has become even more intensified. So we created this collection in order to shine a light on the issues that the industry has and to inspire you all to make more conscious decisions in your purchases.

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Backstage, she elaborated on the difficulties of creating a truly sustainable collection. “One of the most limiting things is finding new fabrications,” she said. It’s especially hard if you want clothes that shine, like the bubble skirt, which she ended up making from recycled polyester. “We don’t usually use polyester, but it is what it is.”

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Another piece, a mock-neck cardigan, was made of a super-soft, fully traceable Australian wool called “Slowool,” while a trench had biodegradable potato starch buttons. In the sustainable fashion game, perfection is impossible, so you just try to get as close as you can. It’s a challenge that seems made for McManus, who is often praised for her thoughtful approach to fabrics and exquisite attention to detail.

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As for the tiny briefs and lace leggings: “I work on a very serious topic," McManus said. "And it can be a little bit depressing, to be honest, because we're so small in terms of what's actually happening in the industry. So sometimes it's nice to have fun with shorts or bubble skirts. At the end of the day, we all live one life.”

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Izzy Grinspan is Bazaar's digital director. Previously, she was the deputy style editor at New York magazine's The Cut, and before that, she ran the gone-but-not-forgotten shopping website Racked.

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